Portfolio Media. Inc. | 860 Broadway, 6th Floor | New York, NY 10003 | www.law360.com
Phone: +1 646 783 7100 | Fax: +1 646 783 7161 | customerservice@law360.com
California Powerhouse: Gibson Dunn
By Linda Chiem
Law360, New York (May 21, 2015, 6:16 PM ET) -- With its deep California roots and penchant for tackling
high-stakes matters, Gibson Dunn has helped shape the Golden State economy and legal landscape by
notching landmark trial victories, blazing a trail in appellate work and steering multibillion-dollar
transactions.
Founded as a small Los Angeles practice 125 years ago, Gibson Dunn has since grown into a more than
1,200-attorney global juggernaut, while still remaining one of the largest and most respected law firms
in its home state of California with 456 attorneys in five offices in Los Angeles, Century City, Orange
County, Palo Alto and San Francisco whose corporate, regulatory and litigation work has had a farreaching impact beyond the Golden State’s borders.
More recently, Gibson Dunn’s team notched a landmark civil rights victory protecting students’
fundamental right to education, steered a multibillion-dollar merger that created the largest Los
Angeles-based publicly traded company, and is advising on the proposed development of an NFL
stadium in the Los Angeles area, not to mention numerous other real estate transactions, landing
Gibson Dunn a spot among Law360's California Powerhouses.
“We are a firm that prides itself on collegiality, collaboration and teamwork, and I think that enables us
to better serve our clients across borders. And that’s reinforced structurally where we don’t have any
structural impediments to working with one another or finding the best expertise on a matter,”
Managing Partner Ken Doran told Law360.
Gibson Dunn began taking shape in 1890 when corporate attorney John Bicknell, whose clients included
Southern Pacific Railroad, teamed up with litigator Walter Trask to create a law firm providing litigation
and transaction-related services. Judge James Gibson joined the firm in 1897, and six years later, the trio
merged their practice with that of former Los Angeles City Attorney William Dunn and former Assistant
City Attorney Albert Crutcher.
Gibson Dunn started out working with railroad, utility and land companies, but has built itself into a fullservice global firm that has grown beyond California with outposts in London, Paris, Washington, D.C.,
and New York City, further expanding throughout Europe, South America, the Middle East and Asia,
according to the firm’s website.
Gibson Dunn boasts a deep and wide bench of top-tier talent whose expertise has made the firm a
dynamo in litigation, antitrust, securities, finance, mergers and acquisitions, real estate, capital markets
and white collar, according to Doran.
But what also sets the firm apart is the long-standing relationships it has built with notable clients and
its bent for tackling high-stakes matters for clients that includeMicrosoft Corp., Time Warner Cable
Inc., Nike, Hewlett Packard Co., Dole Food Co., Matson Inc. and others.
Over the past year, Gibson Dunn has made a splash on the M&A and capital markets front by steering
multibillion-dollar transactions.
In a high-profile deal for longtime client Aecom Technology Corp., Gibson Dunn guided the engineering
and construction firm in its $6 billion acquisition of larger rival URS Corp. last year, creating an
approximately $19 billion engineering and construction giant that is the largest publicly traded company
based in Los Angeles.
Peter Wardle, a Los Angeles-based corporate partner and co-chair of Gibson Dunn’s capital markets
practice, told Law360 that it was a “transformative” transaction for Aecom that was born out of a
relationship nearly a decade in the making, dating back to when Gibson Dunn worked on Aecom’s $700
million initial public offering in 2007.
“By the time we got to 2014 and it came down to buying a company that’s larger to create a juggernaut,
we intimately knew all the people involved on a much deeper level to work out what was the best way
to accomplish [the transaction] and avoid some of the pitfalls,” Wardle said.
While Aecom had grown over the years through dozens of smaller acquisitions, the company wasn’t
necessarily looking for a big buy at the time, Wardle said. But activist hedge fund Jana Partners LLC had
been putting the pressure on URS to boost shareholder value and that ultimately put the San Franciscobased URS in play, prompting Aecom to more seriously consider a combination with a much larger
company.
The end result: Aecom became the largest Los Angeles-based publicly traded company, with 95,000
employees in 150 countries, and combined revenue of $19 billion for 2013.
“We have this holistic approach where we get to know a client really well, and when it comes time to do
a big M&A transaction, we’ve already got that backdrop,” Wardle said. “Our attorneys have been on
with the client over a number of years and have a deep understanding that gives us the advantage of
propelling any transaction that comes along.”
In another transformative transaction for another longtime California client, Gibson Dunn represented
Conversant Inc. in the digital marketing company’s $2.3 billion sale to Alliance Data Systems Corp. last
year, creating a marketing services powerhouse with greater reach and a broader platform in the
growing e-commerce and online advertising spaces.
“We do have deep roots in California [and] that’s been one of our enduring strengths that clients, year
after year, with big deals or little deals, have turned to us for all of them,” Stewart McDowell, a San
Francisco-based corporate partner and co-chair of the firm’s capital markets practice, said.
Gibson Dunn’s corporate transactional prowess has also resulted in a robust real estate practice —
handling real estate finance and development, acquisitions and land use matters — that has been
picking up plenty of steam this past year.
The firm is lead counsel to Hollywood Park Land Co., a joint venture between Stockbridge Capital Group
LLC and St. Louis Rams owner Stan Kroenke’s real estate firm, the Kroenke Group, in its plan to develop
298 acres in Inglewood, California, which could potentially include a $1.8 billion NFL stadium and 6,000
seat performance venue. The high-profile proposal was announced in January 2015 and it was approved
by the Inglewood City Council in February through a voter-sponsored initiative.
Gibson Dunn has also carved a name for itself handling headline-grabbing civil rights matters in
California.
In a landmark education case called Vergara v. California, a Gibson Dunn team represented nine
California public school students in bringing a successful constitutional challenge against five California
Education Code statutes regulating public school teacher tenure, dismissal and layoffs.
Gibson Dunn helped prove that the statutes created a system that saddled students, especially lowincome and minority students, with grossly ineffective teachers and created vast and unjustified
inequalities in the educational opportunities that were being afforded to students across California.
In June 2014, a state judge in Los Angeles sided with the nine public school students, ruling that the
state's teacher tenure system was unconstitutional and struck down the five state laws governing
teacher hiring, firing and tenure.
Before that, the firm helped lead the charge against Proposition 8, persuading a trial court and then the
Ninth Circuit to recognize same-sex couples' right to marry in the state. The U.S. Supreme Court in June
2013 left the injunction against the enforcement of Proposition 8 intact, ruling that the proponents of
the initiative lacked standing to defend it.
“Our clients’ litigation wins have had a major impact in California and nationwide — from overturning
Prop. 8 and securing the right for same-sex marriage in California, to fighting on behalf of
underprivileged students in California, along with our precedent-setting wins at the U.S. Supreme Court
that have reshaped the landscape for business defendants nationwide,” Christopher Chorba, a litigation
partner and co-partner in charge of the Los Angeles office, said.
California-based litigators also played a central role in exposing systemic fraud underlying foreign
judgments against Dole Food Co. and Chevron Corp., and then setting aside those tainted judgments
and pursuing the wrongdoers throughout the country, Chorba added.
Specifically, a Gibson Dunn team succeeded in getting a California appeals court to toss a $2.3 million
jury award against Dole in March 2014, putting an end to a decadelong dispute between Dole and a
group of Nicaraguans who claimed they were affected by pesticides that Dole used in the 1970s.
The appeals court affirmed a lower court decision vacating the award and axing the suit because the
purported Nicaraguan banana farm workers who sued the company may have built their case on false
testimony at the behest of their attorneys.
Gibson Dunn described it as a “fraud on the court” perpetrated by U.S. and Nicaraguan plaintiffs’
lawyers who had “coached their clients to lie about working on banana farms, forged work certificates
to create the appearance that their clients had worked on Dole-contracted farms, and faked lab results”
as part of a scheme to obtain the judgment against Dole.
It's an impressive run made possible by a collaborative corporate culture that the firm expects to
continue tapping into to build on its strengths and to rack up cases and deals for clients.
“There are no structural impediments for partners to want to work together and provide the best team
for a matter," Doran said. "That’s the hallmark of our culture and it’s been a pretty consistent piece of
our culture. As a growing firm, it's even more important to have a culture that is understood and binding
across the firm.”
--Additional reporting by Daniel Siegal and Jeff Sistrunk. Editing by Mark Lebetkin.
All Content © 2003-2015, Portfolio Media, Inc.